View Ari L. Kaplan's original article here. Posted by LST on January 13, 2012.

Excerpt:

The future of financing a law degree is almost here.

At the Association of American Law Schools annual conference earlier this month, former New York Law School Dean Richard Matasar encouraged audience members to consider various options for transforming legal education.

And, two months ago, Yale Law School professors Akhil Reed Amar and Ian Ayresa published an essay called “Paying Students To Quit Law School,” and initiated an interesting conversation about costs. They suggested that schools refund underperforming students half of their first-year tuition to leave and compared their proposition to the $3,000 offer the successful online shoe retailer Zappos makes to new hires, who may want to quit after completing the company’s training program. …

2012 can be the year to implement a positive shift in the logistics of legal education. The legal academic community has jump-started this discussion by beginning to implement changes to the curriculum, practical training initiatives, and greater transparency in reporting employment statistics.

The time has come to talk more openly about the cost of a legal education and I don’t mean cheaper, I mean different. My suggestions vary from those offered by professors Amar and Ayresa because they are not driven by performance, where schools persuade underperformers to leave, but rather by student preference, where those who find they lack the passion to continue have a realistic choice to walk another road. …

[1] Instead of starting the shift by making law school cheaper, consider restructuring the payment schedule. As the first year seems to be the most commoditized of the three years, with little differentiation among courses and teaching styles, perhaps schools can assign it a lower value. The total cost of a degree would remain the same (for now), but it would give students the option to leave early without an oppressive debt burden. There would be no refund credits necessary.

If, for example and the sake of simplicity, the tuition over three years is $100,000, charge $5,000 per semester in the first year and offer a paralegal certificate the same way that admitted attorneys in some states can automatically become notaries public or licensed real estate brokers. Then charge $22,500 per semester for the following two years. …

[2] Proactively provide students with counseling about whether they should continue with their legal education. Keeping uninspired students may lead to dissatisfied alumni, which is a loss for schools in the long term. Remove the stigma about quitting in favor of alternatives. Have your remarkably creative career services team continue to expand the pool of options for students. Instead of encouraging students to avoid failure, motivate them to seek out their greatest potential for success. That shift could transform the entire profession.

[3] In addition to tuition modifications, we should consider strategies for eliminating some of the ancillary costs associated with the first year as well. For instance, digital publishers must be able to produce fairly standardized casebooks that are supported by ads from bar review companies, research services, local restaurants, and other organizations interested in reaching law students.

Instead of prohibitively expensive print volumes, create versions for the kindle or iPad, and offer premium add-ons like videos from professors similar to those BarBri provided when I studied for the bar in 1997. Perhaps it will include interactive outlines and digital flash cards like those made popular by visionary author Kimm Walton. In fact, there are rumors that Apple is hosting an event in late January to address this very evolution of the textbook market.

This is an extraordinary watershed moment that calls for collective action. Law schools, law firms, legal departments, and even industry analysts, are searching for ways to realign costs with value. Together we can publicize positive proposals and share them with those leaders who can help bring them to fruition.

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View Don J. DeBenedictis's original article here. Posted by LST on January 12, 2012.

Excerpt:

The State Bar is beginning to explore a radical change to what it takes to become a lawyer in California: requiring would-be attorneys to receive practical training with real clients before they can be licensed.

“The basic concept is that before they begin serving clients, lawyers ought to have some real-world experience,” State Bar President Jon Streeter said Tuesday.

Acting during its annual planning meeting Friday and Saturday, the bar Board of Trustees agreed to create a broadly based task force to “explore adding a pre-admission practical skills requirement … to the requirements for admission to the bar.” …

Streeter said the proposed admissions requirement “is still a concept in its infancy.” The ideas up for consideration include allowing law school clinical courses to meet all or part of the requirement, he said, or having “the equivalent of a legal residency” similar to new doctors.

Jeanine English, a nonlawyer member of the board, said another approach might be the method used in accounting. People who have passed the CPA exam work two to four years for a fully licensed certified public accountant, who closely supervises their work.

Legal educators and other experts seemed cautiously intrigued by the general idea.

“I think it’s an excellent idea,” said Drucilla Stender Ramey, dean of Golden Gate University School of Law and the former longtime director of the Bar Association of San Francisco. “My sense is law firms would welcome it.” …

Berkeley Law School clinical Professor Charles D. Weisselberg said cutting law school down to two years to devote the third year to practice experience would run afoul of American Bar Association accreditation standards. But adding a fourth year would put too great a burden on students.

Law school critic and blogger Kyle P. McEntee noted that California law students already pay $40,000 or $50,000 a year in tuition.

McEntee, founder and executive director of the nonprofit group Law School Transparency, said he believes a practice requirement might be a good idea, but he isn’t sure “whether it’s a Band-Aid … or a bigger solution” to the problems of legal education.

He said he supports an idea posted in a blog late last month by University of Texas law professor Matthew Spitzer, a former dean of USC Gould School of Law, that would allow law students or graduates to earn money while obtaining practical experience.

Spitzer proposed “law schools having a law firm (just as medical schools have hospitals) where students start to learn how to practice under lawyer-professors, who both provide training and who charge clients for their services.”

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View Karen Sloan's original article here. Posted by LST on January 10, 2012.

Excerpt:

Judge José Cabranes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit offered a three-part remedy for what ails the U.S. legal academy before a packed ballroom of legal educators who gathers in Washington for the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting.

Cabranes, like others before him, noted that law schools are in “something of a crisis,” given the skyrocketing cost of tuition, ever-higher graduate debts and a growing feeling that legal scholarship is of little use to the bench or practitioners. These themes emerged as the hottest topic of discussion during the four-day conference, which drew about 3,000 legal educators.

“For years, [the rising cost of tuition and growing debt loads] have raised eyebrows. Now, they raise blood pressure,” Cabranes said on Jan. 6. “These developments literally threaten the enterprise of legal education.”

To get back on track, law schools should shift their curricula back to core courses and away from the interdisciplinary classes that have grown in popularity, he said; they should introduce a two-year core law program followed by a yearlong apprenticeship, and increase transparency regarding costs, job prospects and financial aid information. …

Cabranes lamented the move by law schools toward specialized, often interdisciplinary courses that can displace “black-letter” law courses …

Similarly, law schools should give students the option of completing their classroom work in two years, then spend a third year apprenticing with practicing attorneys or working full-time in law school clinics while earning modest stipends, he said. That would give students real-world experience and some income rather than requiring them to pay a third year of tuition. …

Cabranes himself was a law professor at Rutgers University before becoming the general counsel at Yale University and later being appointed to the bench.

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View Moira Herbst and David Ingram's original article here. Posted by LST on January 10, 2012.

Excerpt:

The American Bar Association president’s suggestion that unemployed law-school graduates have no one to blame for their predicament but themselves elicited a range of reactions from law professors and administrators at a major law-school conference, with many expressing dismay at what they called insensitive and misguided remarks. …

Some at the conference of the Association of American Law Schools — the largest annual gathering of law professors — called the comments tactless.

“A lack of concern for law graduates — or anyone, for that matter — looking for a job in this economy smacks of questionable character,” said Robert Ashford, a professor at Syracuse University College of Law who founded the AALS’s Section on Socio-Economics, which focuses on economic issues in the legal profession and in legal education.

Others said Robinson was unfairly picking on students.

“Robinson focuses on the individuals who incurred debt rather than the institutions that induced them to incur that debt,” said Kathleen Clark, a professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “Individuals can be held responsible for their decisions, but we should also examine the responsibility of institutions that have benefited from those individuals’ ill-advised decisions.”

‘OUT OF TOUCH’

Steven Hobbs, a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, was critical of Robinson’s comment that he sold his car to help pay for law school at the University of Kentucky, from which he graduated in 1971. …

“[Robinson] is out of touch in the sense of understanding the current situation and how to address it,” Hobbs said.

But not all disagreed with Robinson’s remarks.

“I think [Robinson] is absolutely right,” said Paul R. Baier, a law professor at Louisiana State University. “The dire economy is obvious. In law we have a doctrine: You are assumed to know the law. I’d add to that and say you must know the economy.”

Robinson did not respond to email or phone messages left Friday afternoon. An ABA spokeswoman said he was not available for comment, but said, “We are very concerned about the way William Robinson’s quotes were used out of context by Reuters.” …

David Logan, dean of Roger Williams University School of Law, who did not attend the conference, said he agreed with Robinson that “law students are adults who should be expected to make reasonable decisions about their future.” But, he said, there remains “a broad consensus about the need for more transparency about costs and outcomes than has been required by the ABA up to this point.”

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View Don J. DeBenedictis's original article here. Posted by LST on January 10, 2012.

Excerpt:

Late last summer, Dean Bryant G. Garth asked Southwestern University School of Law’s newest entering class members if they had a friend or relative share a New York Times article exposing the financial risks of going to law school.

“Every person raised their hand,” Garth recalled.

The front-page story last January focused national attention on a rising chorus of complaints by law students that schools had suckered them into taking on huge debt with false promises of six-figure salaries immediately upon graduation.

Those complaints went on last year to spark several lawsuits, new rules from the American Bar Association’s accreditation arm and demands from U.S. senators for answers. …

“When the market for lawyers is good … there’s less stress in legal education,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the UCI School of Law. “At a time when the market is bad, there’s more stress in legal education.”

But others say the source of the problems lies deeper.

“I think that law students and the public are starting to take a good, hard look at legal education in this country for the better,” said Brian A. Procel of Miller Barondess LLP, who is suing San Diego’s Thomas Jefferson School of Law under consumer protection laws. “They’re just starting to realize this industry is not being run correctly.”

Vanderbilt law graduate and blogger Kyle P. McEntee said his nonprofit, called “Law School Transparency,” is exploring a number of alternative models, such as having more classes taught by part-time adjunct professors – practicing lawyers – who would command lower salaries.

Underlying all the complaints is concern over the accuracy of schools’ employment data.

Many schools report that 80 percent to 90 percent of graduates have jobs nine months after graduation, earning a median salary of $160,000. But those numbers can be misleading. …

And as McEntee and his colleagues have shown, only a small percentage of a school’s graduates may actually earn $160,000. The figure qualifies as the statistical median because only the graduates with good jobs tend to report their pay to their schools – a fact [Susan Westerberg Prager, the former UCLA law dean who now heads the Association of American Law Schools], said means employment data is “inherently flawed.” …

The uproar also prompted California Sen. Barbara Boxer and two of her Republican colleagues to write letters to the ABA and the Department of Education demanding improvements.

In response to the transparency movement, U.S. News & World Report took steps in 2011 to post greater detail about law graduates’ employment.

The ABA Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, which accredits law schools, is beginning to collect detailed annual graduate employment data directly from schools rather than second-hand from the National Association for Law Placement.

But even that effort generated controversy in the fall when the ABA said it would drop questions for the class of 2010 about how many graduates had jobs requiring bar admission or preferring a law degree. The committee said it would bring back the questions for the class of 2011 but needed more time to thrash out the definition of “preferred.” …

Critics have latched onto job data because of the high cost of legal education. At Thomas Jefferson, tuition is about $40,000 a year, and the average graduate’s debt is $135,000. Nationally, law graduates’ average debt load is about $100,000, and some new lawyers carry $200,000.

“That’s too much to pay for an education,” McEntee said. …

All of the bad news has begun to trickle down to potential students. …

“I actually think one of the tragedies of this is the number of people who are deciding not to go to law school now,” the AALS chief said. “I happen to believe that legal education is a great, broad education … in which you develop skills that are useful in many, many other realms.”

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LST's Take:

This is a good synopsis of the last year in legal education. We expect scrutiny to be just as critical and widespread in 2012.

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View Libby A. Nelson's original article here. Posted by LST on January 09, 2012.

Excerpt:

As scrutiny of law schools has increased over the past year, with students bearing increasing loan debt and having more difficulty finding jobs to pay it off, law school deans and professors have come in for criticism. But on the front lines of the battle, dealing with sometimes skeptical prospective students, has been another group: admissions officers.

In a session at the Association of American Law Schools’ conference here Friday, admissions officers spoke of their balancing act: recruiting students without promising more than law school can provide.

“You can run the risk of being a little overzealous in your sales techniques,” said Alicia Cramer, assistant dean of admissions at the South Texas College of Law. …

Not surprisingly, Cramer and her fellow panelists said that admissions offices should be as transparent as possible with prospective students, including disclosing job placement statistics that are as detailed as possible. But they also suggested a few ways to deflect the rising concern, such as emphasizing students’ own responsibilities in finding a job. And when prospective students set their hearts on a certain law school, panelists said, they sometimes hear what they want to hear. …

“We really aren’t doing ourselves, nor are we doing the applicants, a service if we don’t share the information with them,” [Tracy] Simmons [of Chapman University School of Law] said. …

Even with increased transparency, they said, some students will never be satisfied.

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View Libby A. Nelson's original article here. Posted by LST on January 06, 2012.

Excerpt:

As administrators and faculty members from the nation’s law schools gathered here today, there was a general sense among those assembled that legal education is facing challenges. But they found little agreement on what exactly those challenges are, let alone what will be necessary to solve them.

The majority of sessions Thursday were dedicated to subjects other than the turmoil that has swept through the law school world in the past year. But in a workshop dedicated to the future of the legal profession and legal education, much time was spent discussing the new reality for law school graduates and what, if anything, law schools can do — even as it largely elided the more controversial aspects of the situation, such as charges that law schools have deceived their students by reporting misleading employment data. …

For the most part, the law school representatives and panelists focused on a few select issues in what has become known as the “crisis”: that law students are taking on increasing amounts of debt yet having more trouble finding jobs to pay it off, leading to a questioning of the value of American legal education in general and even raising the possibility of Congressional hearings and increased regulation.

Much of the conversation focused on how to better prepare students for the job market …. Other presenters focused on cutting the prices students pay so they would have to borrow less money over all. And some, including the president of the American Bar Association, delivered a full-throated defense of American legal education, which they said may not be perfect but is still valuable. …

American Bar Association William Robinson III [] defended American legal education as the finest in the world. “So many who never went to law school want to talk about law school as a trade school,” Robinson said. “It is not. It is a school of higher learning” — a statement that drew spontaneous applause.

“I have never seen law school as being about job security,” he said, calling the criticism of recent months unfair. “What we were taught is education is about opportunity, not about job security.”

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View David Ingram's original article here. Posted by LST on January 06, 2012.

Excerpt:

Young lawyers with huge educational debts and no jobs in a depressed U.S. legal market should have known what they were getting into, the president of the American Bar Association [William Robinson] said on Wednesday. …

“It’s inconceivable to me that someone with a college education, or a graduate-level education, would not know before deciding to go to law school that the economy has declined over the last several years and that the job market out there is not as opportune as it might have been five, six, seven, eight years ago,” he said.

College graduates are capable of making “an independent decision and a free choice” to go to law school, he said. …

Critics including two U.S. senators have asked whether the bar association does enough to police law schools, a handful of which face allegations that they inflated statistics about post-graduation employment in order to attract more students.

Robinson said the number of schools in question is “no more than four” out of 200 with ABA accreditation, and he said few lawmakers have expressed interest in the subject. “It hasn’t been a groundswell of comment from Congress,” he said.

Stories in The New York Times and elsewhere have scrutinized the accreditation process, suggesting some ABA standards, such as encouraging tenure, unnecessarily raise law school costs.

Robinson called such suggestions unfounded.

“None of the studies show that the ABA rules of certification are what’s responsible for the cost of legal education,” he said. Other factors, such as competition for professors, are driving the increase in cost, he said. …

Robinson recalled his own experience paying for law school at the University of Kentucky, where he got a degree in 1971.

“When I was going to law school, and I sold my Corvair to make first-semester tuition and books for $330, a sizeable portion of the faculty had tenure. They had tenure then and they have tenure now,” he said.

There are still inexpensive options outside the elite law schools, he said. According to ABA statistics, 68 ABA-accredited law schools have annual tuition at or below $25,000.

Among elite schools that charge double that, the ABA is powerless to hold down costs, he said.

“I should take the lead in telling these schools that they should reduce their tuition to $25,000 a year? No, I don’t think I should do that. I don’t think it would be purposeful. I don’t think it would be meaningful. I don’t think it would accomplish anything for me to do that,” Robinson said.

He said “it’s a complex question as to whether the cost is higher than it should be or is justified.”

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LST's Take:

Transcript from William Robinson’s August 2011 video on law school transparency:

In America, we have absolutely the best system of legal education anywhere in the world. We also have some of the best students in the world. And we have in this country a wonderful opportunity to practice law in a free democracy.

In the face of current economic realities, the ABA supports making financial and job information complete and transparent for students and the public. We want to assure, in working closely with our deans and dedicated faculty members, that these students get all of the needed information to make informed decisions.

We want them to be comfortable that when they take on debt they understand the terms and the dimensions and the responsibilities that go along with that debt.

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• Above the Law: Law School Professionals Want Bill Robinson to Put a Sock in It (January 6, 2012)
• Nat'l Law Journal: Law School Professionals Want Bill Robinson to Put a Sock in It (January 6, 2012)

View Karen Sloan's original article here. Posted by LST on January 06, 2012.

Excerpt:

Better. Faster. Cheaper.

That three-word mantra, coined by former New York Law School Dean Rick Matasar, will sound familiar to legal educators who have made the rounds of conferences focusing on the reform of legal education during the past three years.

Matasar, who stepped down from his deanship effective Jan. 1, delivered a cautionary speech during the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools in Washington on Jan. 5.

“We know there are storm clouds on the horizon,” Matasar said, as he ruminated about the poor job prospects facing students, the growing debt load of graduates and the possibility that outside regulators will force changes upon law schools. …

He has long argued that real change would be painful for administrators and professors alike. His views that law schools need the flexibility to take different approaches toward education, such as having faculties that do not enjoy tenure or produce scholarship, have not always been popular. …

[Judith] Areen offered a less dire picture of the future of legal education, but agreed with Matasar that some changes are needed and that law schools need room to experiment. “Obviously, we in legal education need to do more to keep costs down,” she said.

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View Libby A. Nelson's original article here. Posted by LST on January 05, 2012.

Excerpt:

When the Association of American Law Schools gathers in Washington today for a three-day conference, many big and timely issues will be up for discussion. Presentations will address the financial crisis, the mortgage crisis, the legal fallout of the BP oil spill and, perhaps inevitably, Occupy Wall Street.

But relatively few sessions address a crisis making headlines that falls much closer to home for faculty and administrators from the association’s more than 160 member schools: the increasingly prominent questions about transparency, job placement rates and “value” in American legal education, and the attendant concern that law schools could be next (after the “vocational” and for-profit programs subject to the U.S. government’s new “gainful employment” rules) in line for federal scrutiny and regulation. …

Still, few presentations appear to address a central, rising concern in the past year: the amount of debt that law school students accumulate, and their difficulty finding jobs as lawyers to help them pay it off. Legal hiring has contracted during the recession, but the number of students attending law school has not diminished. The central complaint has been that law schools provide insufficient or even misleading data on students’ employment outcomes, failing to separate full-time and part-time work or not taking into account whether graduates are using their degrees. …

Among observers, there are concerns that this could lead to “gainful employment” rules for law schools. Two senators, Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, and Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, have requested information on law school data. The next step could be hearings, such as those held in the Education Committee on for-profit education.

But few sessions at the law school conference reflect this concern. In descriptions that run for pages, none mention student debt or employment outcomes. Only a very few address the changes in legal education, focusing instead on changes in the profession and long-term challenges for law schools (such as those related to alumni giving).

“It really makes you wonder how serious they are, how introspective they’re actually being,” said Kyle McEntee, the executive director of Law School Transparency, a new nonprofit group that urges law schools to release better figures on job placement and other student outcomes.

Those sessions that do focus on changing law schools seem to be “tinkering,” McEntee said. “The one critical question is how can we reduce the cost of educating lawyers.” …

[Susan Westerberg] Prager and Linda Jellum, the association’s associate director, also said the conference will take a broader view of the issues than just the questions surrounding transparency and job placement.

“We’re looking at our profession from a much longer-term perspective and how are we going to best equip our students, and that involves a number of various things,” Jellum said. “We’re interested, but we don’t see it in such a narrow aspect.”

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LST's Take:

Neither do we, Ms. Prager. The lack of law school transparency is indicative of great problems, and these problems will be impossible to ignore much longer.

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Related Stories:

• Reuters: Association of American Law Schools kicks off annual conference